[Building Sakai] site alias

[Adams, David]

Zhen Qian wrote:
> If a user bookmark an alias-url, and later the alias gets dropped,
> will the unresolvable url become a problem?

Inevitably.

> How do people think of the possible case of misuse of the alias
> function, e.g. A user generates hundreds of aliases for a single
> project site?

While I agree with the premise behind this feature (that Sakai site URLs
are very unfriendly), I also think that allowing users to choose
arbitrary URL paths for their sites is asking for worse trouble in any
non-trivially sized installation (I think the same about allowing users
to choose their own mailarchive aliases, too).

I think it's fair to downplay denial-of-service or malicious attacks on
the URL space when considering this feature, because there are far
easier ways to cause trouble in Sakai (creating hundreds of sites, using
dropboxes and attachments to get around quotas), and because the feature
can be disabled.

I think a more reasonable implementation might be to give certain users
or classes of users the ability to create aliases within designated
namespaces (eg sakai.edu/portal/site/DeptNamespace/SiteAlias) or
personal namespaces (eg sakai.edu/portal/site/daveadams/MyCourseSite).
But access to the global namespace in a large deployment just feels like
begging for trouble.

David Adams
Director of Learning Systems Integration and Support
Virginia Tech Learning Technologies